PEOPLE I HAVE CALLED NAMES OTHER THAN THEIR OWN

A partial list because I tend to do this a lot.

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Joel

Real name: Matt. I've mentioned Joel before. I don't know why, but when he joined our Honors Colloquium class, someone thought his name was Joel, and so we all started calling him that. Eventually I started calling him Matt sometimes because I was the only one in class he actually liked. I miss Joel. He exposed me to a lot of really good music and also sort of opened my eyes to some other things too. He was a good friend before that all went to hell.

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Tom

Real name: Mikal. I took astronomy in college, and this guy was in the class. We talked a few times, to the point where I even let him use my phone once, but I never knew his name. My friend thought he looked like Tom Cruise, so we called him Tom. That was not his name. For the record, it was pronounced like mi-CALL.

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Girl

Real name: Corie. Most of you reading this will know my name is Cory, and in a study hall in high school, I was seated with my friends Bobby and Adam and this girl named Corie. Bobby and Adam decided to call her girl Cory/Corie (as opposed to calling me boy Cory/Corie, likely since they had known me a lot longer), and she thought it was funny and went with it. Eventually this was shortened to just Girl. In hindsight, this was a bit of an asshole thing to do I think, but she seemed amused by it.

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Frog

Real name: ??? Another kid from one of my study halls. I have no idea what his actual name was because literally everyone I know who knew him called him Frog. Given that he was a freshman when I was a senior, I never had any classes with him, so I never learned him real name. I've mentioned Frog in a prior list; that kid was weird.

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Mary

Real name: Duck. This is a cat. I started calling her Mary because she had some weird sort of (mild) eye disease. When she moved in, she gave it to all the other cats and then never got it again (it was recurring for the rest of them), so this is a play of "Typhoid Mary"

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Perkins

Real name: Minnie. This is also a cat. We also called her Pork, along with other names. I'm not totally sure what started this to be honest.

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Damien

Real name: Elliott. A third cat. He's called Damien because he's Satan incarnate. He's an indoor cat, but my family and I have found him on the roof of our house AT LEAST three times, and it's a two story house. That's the kind of cat he is.

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Chicago

Real name: Thiago. This was a foreign exchange student from Brazil. His name sounded kind of like Chicago when he told us, and everyone started calling him that. He didn't mind (or so he said). He had Algebra 2 with me, and before he knew English well, someone taught him to say something REALLY inappropriate to this girl Jacqui in our class. Normally she would have flipped out, but she knew he didn't know what he was saying. Eventually that stopped because everyone just really liked him.